The Middle Finger, Having Flipped, Moves On ...

A Letter from the Managing Editor

... and so should you, dear shareholders: nor all your whining nor lawsuits shall lure it back to cancel half a bird.

As most of our readers surely remember from the last issue, we had a very public and slightly testy exchange with some of our more obnoxious shareholders in this space. Apparently our initial sortie against our arrogant aggressors was more than a bit preliminary. I can’t go into too many details because a ridiculously confidential but legally binding settlement has been reached among several concerned parties. However, the ultimate upshot is that “we, the Editorial Board of Speculative Grammarian, are willingly and of our own volition” running a fair number of outrageously expensive advertisements in this issue, publishing a paid (but nonetheless utterly unbiased) movie review, and allowing a non-trivial number of pay-for-placement “QR codes” throughout the issue, including on the page with this very letter from Yours Truly.

As an aside, I have to admit that—though I’ve tried several times to cross my eyes, or uncross them, or whatever it is one is supposed to do—I can’t see the hidden 3D image. I hate those ridiculous things.

I want to re-assure our well-loved readers of, and rub the noses of our much-despised shareholders in, the fact that next issue will not contain so many ads! We’ll put this behind us soon enough, like a bad class in formal semantics.

Now, before some pencil-necked logician gets all high and mighty and points out that the class of readers of SpecGram and the class of shareholders of SpecGram are not guaranteed to be disjoint sets, let me point out that we already thought of that. Do we contradict ourselves? Very well then, we contradict ourselves. (We are large, we contain multitudes.)